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[JAN] New Year, New You

Goodness, wasn't able to get it exactly as I wanted, but I am pretty proud of that sky.

Spoiler:

This is for the secret santa event.

Capture: ZoruaRank: Complex [reduced to Hard]

Last edited by Sou; 01-07-18 at 07:45 PM.

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This is cute. If you don't catch (which you probably will with a Hard), I have some ideas you could use to touch it up.
Actually I guess that just comes off as passive aggressive, or like I know better than you-- so I'll just say them instead of being mysterious:

Pay attention to line weight, specifically things like where the lines in the hair end. A tapered line there will look good.
Perspective. The railing is what jumped out at me at first, it's kind of small (everybody would fall off!) and the perspective is weird-- but a better thing to focus on is the tile rooftop. You've got square tiles, so perspective is really easy to see. The more-or-less straight on view of the group clashes with the kind of 80-degree aerial view (looks like we're looking down at the floor from slightly higher than a 3/4 angle). If you make the floor a more perpendicular shot, it will also fill less of the frame, which means you can install some much taller, much safer railing, without cutting into your lovely starry background. Your shadows, IMO look fine.
Lastly, you could consider going back to rearrange the face of the Zorua on the left. The muzzle doesn't seem to have any bearing on the rest of the face. It reminds me of the style from Peppa Pig, but I don't believe that was your intent. To quickly "fix" this, skew the mouth so it is a hole in the bottom of the snout, not the side (however, Zorua canonically has a very floaty mouth, so it's not inaccurate as-is), pull the nose a little further downstage, and widen the eyes slightly.

Not that you need my help-- it's for Secret Santa, so you were on a time limit. And Smiles probably already graded it. It looks good and fine, and I'm expecting this to have been a capture, but I thought I'd share my thoughts.

[edit]
you've actually done the thing with the lines in the "60% off" submission. Some of the lines in the hair (like in the bangs/fringe) narrow as they change direction or come to an end, but then other lines like in the ponytail don't. *shrug*

Last edited by Truly; 01-12-18 at 06:25 PM.

"Because it's always been this way" should never be an excuse to maintain a broken system.

Goodness, wasn't able to get it exactly as I wanted, but I am pretty proud of that sky.

Spoiler:

This is for the secret santa event.

Capture: ZoruaRank: Complex [reduced to Hard]

claiiim

also, @Truly please refrain from commenting until the people who are paid to comment can do so. It can get confusing to me, the artist, and the people looking at the work. I'm ecstatic that you're bursting with suggestions to help us out, but please wait until the work is curated! If you can't help yourself, I recommend that you apply to be a curator! We really need all hands on deck to get through everything!

ANYWAYS onto the work. The first thing that comes to mind when I look at a painting with fireworks is Whistler, a famous American Impressionist. In particular, this painting comes to mind. The reason why I bring this is up is because I just want to caution you when including something so brilliant and warm, all those neon reds and yellows are striking. Warm colors demand attention, especially when placed around dark blues and black. They demand so much attention, that the scene below them is almost forgotten about. Like in Whistler's painting did you notice the person near the bottom? You could have really shown your expressive side--fireworks are messy and very transient--a perfect harmony of violence, beauty, and ephemeralily, and most importantly, complex emotion.

You said in your description that you spent a lot of time working on the sky, but your sky is better rendered (aside from the symbolic representation of the firework) in much, much greater detail than the remainder of the drawing. It is curious, especially since there is light pollution as evidenced in the scene towards the bottom and and the fireworks towards the top. One can't possibly see that many stars in a city and so it then becomes less about accurate representation, but merely a musing about the possibilities of the upcoming year.

Notice how I'm hitting the sky pretty hard. I think every artist falls in this trap once or more in their artistic career: they start working on a side of the drawing/painting that wasn't their intention to be their focal point. Sometimes it can go to an extreme so that you start to have two different paintings existing simultaneously in the picture plane. Unfortunately, I think this is what happened. Not to deny all your hard work (and I've had this experience in high school many, many ties and each time a teacher or friend pointed it out, my heart sunk like crazy). I think if you cropped the top a little to the point where you see the mane of Zoroark, I think you would have a 300% better, more focused drawing.

So in my head I'll be cropping that out in mind. Sometimes it is best to stop every once a while and see how the work looks as a whole.

Your family of zoroarks are absolutely adorable and very well-rendered. You're definitely improving as an artist with each painting you complete, so please pat yourself on the back! Honestly, I'm not a big fan of sentimental parent-child scenes, but this works because you don't expect the dark, mischievous, and marauding creatures to be loving and caring parents, so automatically there is visual interest. You've captured the likeness to a tee, however, I will start to get a little upset at the cartoonish representation of their mouths that the anime has spoiled us with. Canines have their mouths open along the bottom of their long snouts rather than have like human like mouths and long, trunky nose like Goofy or Pluto.

Truly did raise an important point about their outlines, and I have seen other works where you've worked on erasing them or blending them in to the character. If you really want to use outlines, remember to follow the weight of whatever you want. Outlines are a lot like training wheels--they help you define the object, but since no other object besides the ones that are active have them so it creates a stylistic disconnect. Animes get away with it because the amount of effort to achieve the same amount of rendering needed to match the backgrounds would far exceed the time needed to produce them on a reasonable basis. The only animated film that every scene is rendered at the same quality is the Loving Vincent and that literally took a team of like 100 artists working over like 3 years to do. In fine art, that becomes more of a problem the more complex because 1) stylistically discontinuous 2)makes you think they're secondary to what's going on around them. Your solution to that problem 1) match the background style to the subjects, 2) render your subjects better.

I think you could have done 2) more. Like bring out the furriness of them. Adding in the texture would help allievate some of the problems you're facing. I see that you understand that they're three dimensiona; beings existing in a 3-d space, as evidenced by the careful backlighting and cast shadows. I wish you carried it into some of the minor objects like the wand.

I definitely think the building is way too small compared to the figures. The guard rails are a little flat. I have noticed that in your other works that you have struggled with the flat checkerboard problem. Sitting planes in space is technically difficult and really easy to get wrong and suddenly have the floor standing upright. And unfortunately I think this is no exception. If anything the cast shadows are more telling of the roof's three-dimensional than anything. I would recommend either erasing the roof tiles completely, and making it seem much larger (like having the roof extend off the left of the page.) I really don't recommend keeping the guard rails. I've found a randomimage of a rooftop to give you an idea of the scale I'm talking about. Buildings are really big lol. Surprisingly so!

I think you could have spent some time working on the subjects of your drawing. I do want to see the building rooftop worked on a little more as well as I want to see your image cropped at the top a little before I'm comfortable giving you a bby zorua. :3

"Like the sea? Want to sail across the ocean to the end of days? Want to bring prosperity to the world?"
Then Join Team Aqua in its quest to do just that!
Click the banner below to visit our thread.
You know you want to ;>
I mean... you get a cool banner after all! What's better then that? :)PokePet Box | URPG Stats | Wishlist